Oil on Water
Oil on Water
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Helon Habila on Oil on Water
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A film company, a rejected script, and a subject that wouldn’t let goBefore the novel existed, there was a creative crisis. After moving to the United States in 2005, Habila spent years unable to locate a subject he could commit to, caught between two countries and belonging fully to neither as a writer.
In my first five years in the U.S., I was almost paralyzed. I couldn’t think of a subject matter to write about. What would I write about? Was I supposed to write about Nigeria or America? If it was Nigeria, what do I write about? That was when I wrote ‘Oil on Water’. It happened because a film company contacted me that they wanted me to write about the kidnappings in the Niger Delta. That was what forced me to write ‘Oil on Water’.
The commission that broke the deadlock came with a specific commercial brief: a kidnapping thriller. Habila delivered a draft. The company rejected it. What came next was the novel.
Actually, the book started as a movie script. I was invited by a company to write a movie script. I did a first draft, which they didn’t like, and we parted ways. So I decided to turn it into a novel because that’s what I do, because I had all this research and all this material, and because I feel really fiercely about the subject matter.
The collapse of the film deal turned out to be the novel’s precondition. By the time the company walked away, Habila already knew too much about the Niger Delta to walk away himself.
The research had opened onto something that could not be reduced to a genre plot. Habila came to the Niger Delta as an outsider from the north of Nigeria, and what he found there re-oriented the project entirely, from a kidnapping premise toward the landscape being destroyed beneath the story.
It’s one of the biggest wetlands in the whole world, the Niger delta. It’s a really beautiful place, and it’s systematically being destroyed by the activities of this oil company. It’s such a waste, such a shame that it’s happening. And for what? It’s for money, it’s for oil. It is the duty of the government to protect the country and the environment, and they are not doing that because they get money from the oil companies.
How he wrote it
Pushing the powerful into the background to find the peopleHabila faced a structural problem that goes to the heart of political fiction: the Niger Delta situation involves oil corporations, an arms-length government, and armed militants, all of which could easily crowd out the human story at the novel’s center. His solution was a deliberate act of foreground management.
I did not want to make it too much of a political novel. I wanted to carry the reader into this landscape that’s being destroyed and show the people who are also being destroyed. The big people—the oil companies and the government—they are in the background. You have a sense that they are there, always pulling the strings. But I wanted to draw attention to the environment and the people who are living on that land and who are really suffering.
This approach to politically charged material is not unique to this novel; it is Habila’s consistent method. He described how he moves from a news event toward something that a headline cannot hold.
I like writing about topical issues because I think they are so relevant. You can gauge the pulse of the society in which you live by dealing with such issues. Then you go beyond and in-depth, to look at the characters and the sociopolitical and literary implications of these topical subject matters. So I like to approach my stories that way. I start from the topical and go deeper.
Habila is from northern Nigeria, not the Niger Delta, and he has been candid about the gap that created. For this novel he conducted interviews with people from the region, though he described the process as less rigorous than the fieldwork he would later carry out for his next novel, ‘Travelers’.
Even though with ‘Oil and Water,’ the one about the Niger Delta oil crisis, I had to do a lot of interviews and research for actual, interviewing people, but it was not as rigorously as this one.
On what the book is wrestling with
When criminals fight on stolen landThe militants in the novel commit real crimes, and Habila does not soften that. But he refuses to let the crimes settle the question of the land underneath them. He put the problem this way when discussing how the Delta’s armed groups are typically characterized in public discourse.
I care about the environment and I care about Nigeria, my country. People are taking up arms to fight the government over the land. You find that because of the activities of some of them, there is a tendency to dismiss all of them as criminals and thugs. Even if there are criminals there doing criminal things, what of the land?
Fiction, for Habila, is the form equipped to hold that question open. He drew an explicit contrast with journalism, the profession of the novel’s two protagonist reporters, describing what a news story cannot do that a novel can.
I believe stories should have the same immediacy as stories in a newspaper page, or headline but when you read it, it takes you a bit farther and takes you to places you never would have thought of, if you didn’t read it as fiction.
He grounded this obligation in his own position as a writer from a formerly colonized country, a commitment he stated at the Berlin International Literature Festival in 2024, more than a decade after the novel’s publication.
As a writer from a formerly colonised country, you always have to fight for the people and against injustice.
What he wants us to sit with
What the land costs when no one is watchingThe novel’s two journalists travel into the Delta to find a kidnapped woman, but Habila always intended a second, slower discovery running alongside the rescue plot. He wanted readers to arrive somewhere they would not have reached by reading a news report.
With Oil on Water, what sparked the initial interest for me was that I was approached by a film company and they wanted me to write about the Niger Delta, and this sort of triggered my image of it. The subject was of course, kidnapping, they wanted it to be like a kidnapping story. So, that started that.
The kidnapping frame that the film company requested became, in the novel, the vehicle for something the commissioners never asked for: an account of what systematic environmental destruction does to the people who cannot leave.
Habila’s final insistence is on the gap between what the news cycle records and what actually disappears. He has described the Niger Delta not as a political symbol but as a physical place, one of the largest wetlands on earth, whose loss is irreversible in a way that no policy correction can undo.
It’s such a waste, such a shame that it’s happening. And for what? It’s for money, it’s for oil.